ITALIAN

Literature stood no chance against the competition of reality in 1993. No fiction could beat the appeal of daily newspapers and TV news bulletins with their relentless stories of financial empires tumbling down, well-known magnates biting the dust, powerful political parties crumbling, and mighty politicians of all stripes standing accused of corruption and complicity with organized crime. There was, predictably, a flurry of instant books by journalists, sociologists, and magistrates dissecting the scandals of the day and assessing the threat they posed to national unity, but these books were more talked about than bought or read. To stimulate a flagging market, some publishers introduced the "supereconomical" paperback offering integral classics, from Epicurus to Freud, for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, new literature continued to be published in quantity and quality not significantly different from in the past. Some works of fiction turned out to be strangely attuned to the apocalyptic mood sweeping across the country. By far the most compelling was Il cardillo addolorato by Anna Maria Ortese, a well-established though still somewhat underrated writer. Set at the end of the 18th century and written in a rich, transparent style, this remarkable novel told the story of three young men from Northern Europe who go to Naples and remain trapped there by the bewitching coldness of a mysterious young woman; the real protagonist, however, was the goldfinch of the title, whose haunting, magical singing time and again announces the defeat of reason and love and the triumph of a dark inhuman power over all human calculations and projects. It was a measure of the author’s artistic achievement that her pervasive use of irony in respect to characters and events only served to increase the tension and suspense of the fiction. The same device achieved the opposite effect in Aldo Busi’s Vendita galline Km 2, a rambling and occasionally witty monologue, ostensibly by a dead lesbian, in which the art of social gossiping was elevated to breathtaking new heights. Also dead was the narrator, as well as most of the other voices, in Roberto Pazzi’s Le città del dottor Malaguti, an elegant, captivating story in which fantasy and reality cooperated to explore and expose, with a mixture of compassion and contempt, the sick rituals of a beautiful provincial city that, rather cleverly, was identified as Ferrara only in the novel’s last word. More decidedly gloomy and enigmatic was Franco Ferrucci’s Fuochi, a series of episodes in the sentimental journey of a young man, ending with his choosing at once love and death. What was intriguing and unsettling about this unusual book were its apparent contradictions: the sensuality of its language and the insubstantiality of its temporal and spatial settings, its rhapsodic structure and style, and the coherence and unity of the theme of death that inspired it. Equally dark in mood, but more clearly contemporary in setting, were the six short stories in Elisabetta Rasy’s Mezzi di trasporto, six solitary journeys by six different means of transport into the same unpredictable, but generally inhospitable and degraded, contemporary world.

The year saw the return to fiction writing, after a silence of over 30 years, of Domenico Rea, one of the most forceful and expressive Neapolitan writers of the 1940s and ’50s. In setting, subject, and style his Ninfa plebea--the story of a young woman’s progression from the gutter to the altar--appeared still to belong to that literary period, despite its having acquired a new lexical explicitness that might not have been acceptable then.

Much more successful was Bagheria, Dacia Maraini’s autobiographical account of her childhood in Sicily in the late ’40s, an evocation of the island’s natural beauty and, at the same time, an impassioned denunciation of its more recent moral and environmental devastation. Set at the opposite end of the country and covering the period from World War II to the present, were the stories of Il silenzio by Gina Lagorio, a book of classic beauty and maturity, in which a woman comes to terms with her solitude, still finding in the world of nature and society plenty of reasons for loving life.

Finally, most notable among new writers who made their mark during the year was Paolo Maurensig. His novel, La variante di Lüneburg, was the compelling story of two chess masters, one a Jew and the other a former Nazi officer, who, beyond the war and the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, continue to seek one another in order to play out one last deadly game. This book seemed to encapsulate all the main features of the most recent and distinguished Italian narrative: on the one hand, the search for a rich, lucid, and effective language, far from both extremes of banality and literary pompousness; on the other, the sense that literature can only reveal, but not resolve, the mystery that lies at the heart of history and reality. Lino Pertile

SPANISH

Spain

The coveted Planeta Prize, traditionally awarded each year to a Spaniard for the best pseudonymously submitted manuscript of fiction, went to the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa (whose application for Spanish citizenship was approved in July); his Lituma en los Andes is a story of political violence and social regression--laced with Dionysian overtones--in a contemporary Andean setting. Runner-up in the Planeta competition was essayist Fernando Savater’s first attempt at extended fiction, El jardín de las dudas, a lively epistolary exchange between Voltaire and an enlightened French noblewoman exiled to the benighted latitudes of 18th-century Madrid.

José Luis Sampedro and Antonio Gala both appeared regularly on best-seller lists all year long. El águila bicéfala, Gala’s collection of meditations on the eternal riddle of love, prepared readers for his denser work, La pasión turca, which probed the complex passions of a middle-class Spanish woman driven to extremes by self-destructive love for a duplicitous Turk. Sampedro published two collections of short stories--Mar al fondo (1992) and Mientras la tierra gira--as well as the concluding volume of an ambitious trilogy (Los círculos del tiempo); focused on the antimonarchist uprising of 1808 and the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931, Real sitio offered an intimate, two-tiered drama set against a historical background of political intrigue and national upheaval.

Critics lavishly praised Juan Marsé’s ninth novel, El embrujo de Shanghai, in which the contrasts between a dreary neighbourhood in postwar Barcelona and the exotic atmosphere of Shanghai in 1948 underscore the gulf between the innocence of Marsé’s adolescent narrator and the grim reality of a treacherous adult world. Francisco Umbral exposed the twisted values and perverse milieu of an idealistic young fascist in Madrid1940; in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s riveting thriller for bibliophiles, El club Dumas, a rare-book dealer unravels the mystery of a diabolical 12th-century manuscript; and Días contados, by Juan Madrid, graphically depicted the seamy side of life in the capital’s rough Malasaña district. Fans of Antonio Muñoz Molina welcomed his first collection of short stories, Nada del otro mundo.

Two milestones bracketed the literary year: the sudden death of Juan Benet in January (see OBITUARIES) and the award in December of the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour in Hispanic letters, to the prolific novelist Miguel Delibes. Roger L. Utt

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